


The Mountains of Madness and the Bright Blue Sky

by busaikko



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Intersex Character, Intersexuality, Lovecraftian, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-03
Updated: 2007-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-20 23:55:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who needs the mountains when we've got the sky?; or, How to Define John Sheppard in Several Disastrous Missions</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mountains of Madness and the Bright Blue Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by liseuse.
> 
> All characters are overly familiar with H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, because when someone mentions 'great lost Ancient city' and 'Antarctica' -- well, that's Lovecraft territory to me.
> 
> Warning: Mentions gender and abuse (in the context of intersex identity) which may be disturbing.

> Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities,  
> and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy  
> under the magic of the low midnight sun.
> 
> On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying  
> owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky  
> to merge into one mystical opalescent void  
> with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
> 
> H P Lovecraft, 'At the Mountains of Madness' in 'At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror' pages 20-21, London, HarperCollins Publishers, 2002)  
> 

John outgeeked himself when he pronounced the city at the bottom of PC2-L00's fourth-largest freshwater lake _R'lyeh_. The natives did have a propensity for cephalopod worship, it was true. John fidgeted though the trade negotiations, and when Rodney left his tablet unattended -- for ten minutes, which was how long it took to figure out the weird alien toilet -- he came back to find his scans of the city's energy grid labelled _Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn_. The weird alien toilet had been a thing of many tentacles, and Rodney offended everyone in the room when he burst into irrepressible snickering. John had managed to look both wide-eyed innocent and irritatingly smug: it was something about his eyebrows, Rodney thought with grudging admiration.

Talks broke down when they discovered that their hosts really _were_ trying to summon weird energy beings from another dimension, and that they needed the Atlantis ZPM to do it. The R'lyehians, unfortunately for them, had not known that John was violently allergic to having his team taken hostage. He managed not to blow up the entire city, just the parts that were in the way. In the puddlejumper as they shot up through the water and into the brilliant blue sky, Teyla and Ronon were lightly singed but still aglow with post-battle energy; Rodney had been mauled by a projectile squid and had perfectly round sucker marks up one arm and around his throat.

John looked at his team, and his mouth went thin. "Squid fucking _bastards_ ," John said, and Rodney blinked.

"Kiss your mother with that mouth, Sheppard?" he asked, and the corners of John's mouth went up in a smile that was nearly a perfect V. It was unnerving.

"My poor sainted mother always did want a girl instead," John said, and Rodney laughed.

"Your mother should meet Cadman." John's smile softened into something less dangerous, and he made a little _heh_ noise as he whipped the puddlejumper around the looming black mountains, evading their pursuers and heading straight for the stargate. He slapped the address into the DHD, aimed right for the gate, and at the last second pulled straight up in a move that would have reduced them all to jelly if not for the inertial dampeners. On the sensors, Rodney saw the R'lyehian ships shoot through the gate.

"Where'd you send them?" he asked, and John's teeth flashed as the puddlejumper made a tight loop and swept back towards the ground.

"Place with the bugs," John said, and dialled Atlantis.

John lurked in the infirmary, arms crossed, until Teyla and Ronon and Rodney were set free. Rodney had gauze around his neck and all down his arm, and the marks didn't so much burn any more as ache, muscle-deep. Carson had said there wasn't any poison evident, and he'd given Rodney a few shots, but Rodney suspected that Carson only did that for his own amusement. Certainly there was no pain actually being killed.

John walked Rodney back to his room with one hand on Rodney's elbow, as if Rodney needed to be steered. He followed Rodney inside, and Rodney thought it was weird when John undressed him and put him to bed, but then there was the novelty of John's mouth around his dick. Rodney came in John's mouth and fell asleep, and when he woke in the morning he had absolutely no idea what had happened.

"You!" he said to John several days later, when they finally had a moment alone, even if it was while standing with his back to John's and his shoulder braced against the panel that contained the creature which had slithered up from the wastewater treatment plant.

"What?" John said. He'd been slimed with something that smelled absolutely foul, and his boots had practically no traction on the floor.

"We had sex!" Rodney said.

John's left foot slipped, and until he got his footing again Rodney had to bear the battering of the creature against the panel alone. "Sorry," John said, finally and breathlessly, throwing his back into the effort to hold the panel in place. Rodney breathed out as he felt the pressure ease. "I really am," John said. "Sorry, that is."

"No, no," Rodney said, waving the apologies away with his left hand. "I just had no idea that you -- "

"I do," John said. "Do you -- ?"

"Well, _yes_ ," Rodney said, not having any idea what they were actually talking about. He was hypothesizing that _yes_ meant having sex again, and more specifically, he thought that as soon as this whole stupid crisis was over would be a _fantastic_ time to have sex again.

"Good," John said, and then they both _oof_ ed as the panel buckled out at them.

"So -- later?" Rodney said, making sure, and John grunted something affirmative as the panel began to splinter. Rodney heard footsteps clattering down the stairs, and John ordered him to run, and then John was somehow between him and the creature, firing round after round into it as the marines arrived with more guns and grenades.

So of course there turned out to be more of the hulking, monstrous creatures. Rodney refused to call them Shoggies, but everyone else did. He blamed John for that, in the same way that he blamed John for the fact that the night of great sex he'd had in mind was replaced by John giving him two desperate supply-closet handjobs during the 72 hours when everyone feared being slimed to death.

When it was all over, Rodney tracked John down using stealth and technology. He wanted a good hard fuck and then to sleep for twelve hours straight.

What he found was John, ripped and bloody jacket draped over bruised shoulders and one arm in a sling, sound asleep with his head on his desk, drooling onto one of the navy blue SGC manuals for dealing with alien lifeforms (semi-sentient). Rodney felt a warm rush of sleep-deprived, dopey affection. He scrawled _It's life, John, but not as we know it_ on the book cover, gave John's hair a hard ruffle, and staggered back to his own quarters alone.

So nothing happened, but something happened, and Rodney suspected -- based on the evidence at hand, mysteriously-appearing bags of Doritos in his desk and two hundred grams of hazelnut coffee in his room and John's hand on his shoulder, sometimes -- that he was somehow dating, now. He was a bit put out that there'd never been any real discussion of this, but he also knew that he was too much of a relationship-conversation-shirking coward himself to ever bring it up.

It came to a head on the planet with the 2-metre-tall penguin-like creatures. In the report that they filed, the pseudo-penguins were the planet's star attraction: useless, but adorable in the videos, with their beady-eyed waddle and childlike curiosity. The planet's true hidden horror was that the scrubby lichen covering the wind-eroded hills emitted spores that reacted with the titanium dioxide in Rodney's homemade sun-block to create a powerful aphrodisiac (Rodney had threatened Carson with _lawyers_ if he ever broke doctor-patient confidentiality about this unfortunate phenomenon).

John, Ronon, and Teyla had all, at Rodney's nagging insistence, smeared the stuff on their noses and cheeks (because hello, cloudless sky plus lots of snow equalled bad sunburn); this was just enough to require a quick duck behind some boulders for a little palliative masturbation. Rodney, on the other hand, had practically bathed in sun-block. He found himself so hard he was practically screaming in frustration, yet unable to reach orgasm. After his third unsuccessful trip to the rocks, John went back with him.

John didn't say anything. He slicked Rodney's cock up with Teyla's hand cream, lowered his trousers, and let Rodney fuck him with single-minded ferocity. Rodney had never come hard enough to pass out before. When he finally blinked back into consciousness, his head was cradled in John's lap, and John was stroking his hair.

"So -- was it good for you?" he snapped, humiliated, dropping his forearm over his eyes so he couldn't see the puzzled stares of the psuedo-penguins who'd come over to watch.

"You sure do know how to show a guy a good time," John said, and Rodney could hear his grin.

"That is so not how I imagined our first time," Rodney bit out, and then hoped the blush wasn't visible from where John sat.

John slid an arm under Rodney's shoulders and manhandled him into an awkward position with Rodney's face mashed against John's stomach. It was kind of nice, in a way.

"I like being with you," John said, his fingers rubbing Rodney's scalp, and Rodney heard the delicate stress that meant _being with_ being with; and how junior high school was that?

"I like doing things the _normal_ way," Rodney said, and if he hadn't noticed how John's breathing changed at that he'd have been forced to return his genius card. "Stop that," he said, and poked John in the stomach. "I'd like to know that there's a bed in the future. With sheets, and pillows, and running water nearby, and preferably no monsters or aliens or damned avian voyeurs."

"Ronon says they're not actually birds," John said idly. "They roasted them on Sateda for the Feast of the Martyred Whore."

"Huh," Rodney said, because really, _the martyred whore_? The weirdest holiday Canada had was Boxing Day.

"Ronon said they taste like snake," John said, and there was just enough repressed glee in his voice to tell Rodney that John was having him on. He grabbed the hem of John's shirt and yanked upwards, and it was gratifying to know that John Sheppard screamed like a girl when he was tickled. His victory didn't last long -- Rodney was sure that even though Air Force basic training was pathetically short (ask any Marine), it did include mandatory evasive manoeuvres. When Rodney found himself on his back, John straddling his hips, he was prepared for torture in kind. But instead John put one hand on either side of Rodney's head and leant in for a kiss. Despite the rocks and the non-avian penguins, the kiss was everything that a first kiss should have been, and Rodney felt tentatively, nervously, insanely hopeful.

When the kiss ended, he put a hand on the back of John's neck and kept him right there. "I want," he started, and John shut him up with a quick kiss.

"Hush," John said sternly, and rolled to his feet, offering Rodney a hand gallantly. "Don't say a word. You'll call down the wrath of the Elder Gods."

"Right," Rodney said. "Did you read that in your horoscope this morning? Don't you know that whenever you entertain a stupid superstition you lose five I.Q. points?"

John grinned, giving Rodney a smooth snap-point. "No wonder MENSA wouldn't take me after I started reading tea leaves."

Rodney grumbled and stomped back to the puddlejumper. He didn't look behind him to see if John was there; he knew that he was. And also? The fake penguins made his skin crawl.

The only advantage to the horrible physical examination with Carson afterwards was that Rodney was able to leave with his privacy intact and his pockets heavy with pilfered lube and condoms. Rodney made himself wait two days after they got back before making his move (an e-mail that read, _Sat night, Y/N?_ ). John was apparently seduced by this suave approach, because he not only accepted but also asked what he could bring. Rodney refused to consciously whore himself out for good coffee. He drummed his fingers on the table for a full minute before dashing off a reply ( _your toothbrush_ ). He hit send, felt instantly the horror of what he'd done, and banged his head quietly against the white board until Radek's nervous rabbity stare annoyed him into feeling more himself.

"Eight work for you?" John asked, grabbing Rodney's arm as he rushed out of the mess hall Saturday morning; Rodney was just staggering in.

"Sure," Rodney said, and John slapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. Rodney spent the morning rubbing his cheerful bruise.

John brought an assortment of Japanese Pocky snacks in weird flavours and a DVD of In the Mouth of Madness. Any movie with an axe maniac that was made in Ontario was _by definition_ good; Rodney hadn't laughed so hard in ages. The pumpkin Pocky wasn't as horrible as the salt caramel Pocky, but when the movie was all over Rodney shoved all the candy back into the bag and muttered pitifully about giving half his Nobel prize for just plain regular chocolate.

John threw an arm around Rodney's shoulders. He had a dark chocolate Toblerone in his hand, and while Rodney's memory was never exactly clear afterwards, he had the vague feeling that he'd promised eternal love and maybe his first born child. When he came to his senses his mouth was kissed wet and cacao-sweet, his shirt was shoved up over his nipples, and John had Rodney's cock halfway down his throat. Rodney gurgled and gasped out more pledges of his undying whatever whatever, and then he was coming, his eyes on John and John's mouth and the dimples where John's fingers were holding down his hips.

"You're a cocktease," Rodney said, as bitterly as was possible after that blowjob. "I don't understand you at all." John had that horrible confused and wounded look on his face that made Rodney want to slap him, because really -- a grown man couldn't possibly be that naive. "I haven't seen you naked even once. We've been dating for -- what -- three weeks? I've never even touched you. I'm bi, I'm not freaked out, I like _reciprocating_ , I like _making my lovers come_. If you want to be a martyr, well, off to Sateda with you."

"Rodney," John said. " _Rodney_. Can you just shut up one minute? Just -- let me explain."

Rodney narrowed his eyes and did up his trousers. "Like why you haven't let me touch you once?"

"Like that I don't have a dick." John stopped, pressing his lips together hard.

Rodney snorted. "You're forgetting that I've _seen_ your dick."

"Fake," John said, scooting down the bed and pulling one knee up to his chin.

Rodney's brain was click-click-clicking away: he could always trust it to work well without letting any bothersome emotions get in the way. He actually felt his expression shift from fuzzy post-orgasmic ire to the head-tilted sharp focus that he used when confronting a new problem, or building a bomb. "I thought the U.S. military didn't accept transsexuals."

"I'm _not_ \-- " John said, and his face twisted up. "Is it too late to just drop this conversation?"

"Yes. Spill."

"When I was born they thought I'd make a better girl than a boy, and the surgery is not exactly reversible."

"Jesus _fuck_ ," Rodney said, and John looked as if he _had_ slapped him; Rodney only really swore when something was life-threatening or had gone wrong on a cosmic scale. Rodney felt angry and appalled, and John looked as if he was trying to figure out if Elizabeth would let him get the Ancient time-rewinder gadget from MSK-871 out of storage so he could erase the awkwardness of this conversation. John worked a thread loose from his blanket and twisted it between his fingers into a tight knot. "So which are you now?"

John raised his eyebrows and held out one hand, palm up. "Legally? Genetically? Physically?" He shrugged, and his shoulders stayed that way, hunched. "I decided that I'm a guy. No false advertising, here." He caught Rodney's expression and looked away.

"What about sex," Rodney asked. "How do you get off?"

John shrugged. "I don't have the equipment -- and it's okay," he said, trying to look reassuring, which didn't work, because he looked as freaked out to be talking about it as Rodney felt hearing it. "You don't miss what you've never had. And I can fly," he added. "Flying's good, and I'm told it's kind of the same."

"Less chance of motion sickness with your average orgasm, though," Rodney said absently. "So -- why -- " he waved a hand around in a helicoptoring motion -- "this? Why me? What's the point?"

"When I was a kid," John started, and then gave Rodney a faint, sick smile. "When I was a little girl, I remember being taken to hospital and having everyone looking at me and touching, down there. Taking pictures. And I had to shut up and _let_ them." Yes, he was definitely hunching; Rodney's own shoulders ached in sympathy. "I don't like being touched. In general. But some people I don't mind." He lifted an eyebrow, letting Rodney know that he knew just how fucked-up he was. "I like touching you," he said, and looked miserable.

But Rodney found himself nodding, the way he did when Zelenka bounced an idea off him. "And being touched by me," he said, with a tentative smile, and John shrugged what might have been agreement, in an adolescent kind of way. Rodney shifted about on the bed, stretching out on his side and whapping the pillow until it was just the right height. "Come here," he said, and gestured, and refused to be satisfied until John was pressed to his chest, with Rodney's arms around him and John's head on Rodney's shoulder. "You'll have to teach me what you like," he said, leaning closer to John and nearly getting a mouthful of hair.

"Okay," John said, his body slowly ratcheting down from muscle-straining tension. He sounded as if he were falling asleep; Rodney tightened his arms. "This is good."

"Good is good," Rodney said. "Flying is better. I," he added, speaking to the hair, "am going to make you fly. One way or another."

"Wake me up when you figure it out," John said, and shut his eyes. Rodney spread his hands over John's back, feeling the steady rise and fall as John breathed and stilled.

It took five disastrous expeditions and a great deal of desperate adrenaline-fuelled sex before Rodney did figure things out. Or rather, he figured out enough that John did not, in between the frantic episodes of sex, continue to threaten to beat or kill him or send him to Heightmeyer for counselling. He hadn't had enough girlfriends and boyfriends to actually know if or how he treated them differently from regular friend-friends (not that he had many of them, either). It _didn't help_ he said (and said, and said) that beneath John's cool-boyfriend exterior insecurity lurked like a man'o'war, with tentacles and poisonous stings. And he didn't think that he was treating John differently because he had a vestigial vagina; he thought he was treating John differently because in the whole of his sheltered life, no one he knew had ever told him that they'd been abused as a child, and especially no one that he cared for as much. Not that he knew how to say that to John, whose sexual history seemed to have been a string of horrible, uncaring one night stands.

Their sixth disastrous mission found the puddlejumper knocked out of the sky over P9L-810 by enormous flying pink lobsters. On the one hand, giant attacking aliens equalled very bad; but on the other hand, it was hard to take anything that pink seriously. John struggled to direct the crash away from the sharp rise of a caldera and pretended to yell at Rodney for forgetting to make the ritual sacrifice to Yog-Sothoth before leaving Atlantis.

The 'jumper bounced and skidded across a field of resinous-looking fungi, and when Rodney was finally able to stop laughing (it was hard; every time he glanced at John, John made a wiggly octopus gesture with his hands) Ronon asked him, very seriously, how he could forget such an important thing. Which made John nearly piss himself laughing. They had to take turns explaining Cthulhu and Lovecraft in between fits of giggles and jumper diagnostics and radio messages back to Atlantis.

Teyla apparently had been listening to Rodney more than he'd thought, and asked some very good questions about other dimensions and hyperspace and the Elder Gods. Rodney had never before considered a career as a science fiction writer, but he suddenly had twenty fantastic ideas for plots. The books would sell, too, he thought, if he based his heroine very closely on Teyla.

Caught up in a fantasy of autographing copies of _Wraith at the Threshold_ , he completely missed John appointing himself the one who needed to go outside and whack the thrusters with the Ancient equivalent of a spanner. With a dreary sort of predictability, this led to John being marched off through the fungus at spear-point while Elizabeth dithered over the radio about whether the puddlejumper had crashed in a sacred site and whether the pink things were sentient, until Rodney wanted to scream. Nearly an hour later, Elizabeth finally agreed that violence was the only solution, and John was duly rescued.

Fleeing the pathetic caverns where the natives lived, they were forced to break cover and run through the field of fungus, with the aliens close on their heels and lobsters circling in the air overhead, lobbing explosives. Ronon grabbed Teyla up and threw her over his shoulder as he ran. Rodney looked at John hopefully, but John just seized his hand and pulled so hard that Rodney had to keep up or lose his arm.

They would have been within sight of the puddlejumper, had it been visible, when John suddenly tackled Rodney sideways and wrapped his arms around Rodney's head.

"This is hardly the time or the place," Rodney said, and then something made such a loud noise that the ground beneath them dropped away. Rodney had a brief glimpse of John's face, comical with consternation, and then his back hit the ground and John fell crushingly down on his front. Things went black and breathless for a while, until he became aware of being shaken in a very annoying way.

"Hey, Rodney," John was saying, holding himself up in an anxious hover, "hey, are you okay?"

Rodney finally managed to wheeze in a half-breath, and he coughed it out instantly, his mouth foul with the taste of burnt mushrooms.

"You," he gasped with the next breath, eyes watering from the brightness of the sky, and John's forehead wrinkled.

"I'm sorry," John said, smoothing down Rodney's hair and looking lost. "Just, um… bomb."

"I want," Rodney said, the words coming easier and his whole body going light, "to tell. You."

"Shh," John said, shifting up in slow, slow increments to look around. "I know."

"Well. Good." Rodney let John pull him up into a low hunch, and then they made a mad dash for the jumper. John took the controls, and the jumper shot up above the peaks, through brilliant blue sky adorned with golden cumulonimbus clouds and attack formations of lobster. They were above the atmosphere by the time Rodney's euphoria wore off and he realised that he was actually in a lot of pain.

When they got home, Carson wondered aloud how Rodney'd managed to crack a rib in a field of mushrooms. Rodney had tried to look martyred; John mumbled something about falling on him, and Carson had looked as if he would have laughed, except that he'd been taught not to mock patients in medical school.

John walked Rodney back to his room in a very subdued and solicitous mood.

"So, um," John said, standing just inside the door and sliding his hands down his pants as if he'd forgotten that he didn't have pockets. "I'll just go, then…"

"What?" Rodney said, sitting down and making sure to wince. "You think I -- " _want to be alone with my misery? Don't want you around just because I'm not up to fucking?_

He remembered lying stunned on his back, and John taking care of him. He'd realised then, staring up into a sky which shone with perfect clarity thanks to oxygen starvation and the terror of impending death, that his definition of who John Sheppard was listed gender and childhood trauma way down at the bottom, with things like brave and selfless and protective and annoying and geek (the man sang _Cthulhu Loathes Me_ in the shower) still at the top. It had been a relief to know, with certainty. He wished John could feel what he did; he wondered how John defined him. He realised he was staring, and he tried to smile reassuringly.

"Rodney?" John said, looking alarmed. He crossed the room and checked the back of Rodney's neck for fever. "Where does it hurt? Do you want me to call Carson? Are you going to throw up?"

Rodney waved his hands. "No, no. Epiphany. Um. Eureka."

John frowned and reached down to take Rodney's pulse.

"I know who you are," Rodney said, with deep sincerity, and John sighed and took Rodney's jacket off carefully, replacing it with a button-up pyjama top that Carson had loaned him.

"Mmm," John said, crouching to do up the buttons, fingers gentle over the bandages. "I'm just glad you're not hallucinating the Grand Unified Theory, or you'd cry for a week when the high wore off." He tugged off Rodney's trousers and hung them on the desk.

"You are staying, right?" Rodney said, trying not to look stoned. "Because I like you, you know -- "

"Yeah," John said, and grinned down into his face. "Just let me have some quality time with my toothbrush."

Rodney was mostly asleep when John padded out in just his boxers. John put the lights out and slipped under the covers. It was hard to negotiate a comfortable sleeping arrangement, what with Rodney in pain and John being contrite and treating him as if he were too delicate to hold, but with nagging and grumbling and a minimum of elbows in sensitive places they finally settled into a good enough position, tangled together.

"I really am sorry," John said, stroking Rodney's hair as if he were a cat, and pressing little kisses down along Rodney's cheek.

"Shut up, I'm sleeping," Rodney said. "Don't stop."

"Okay," John said. "Okay."

And it was.

.:. .:. the end .:. .:.


End file.
